If you aim to achieve something you need to follow a direction. Without direction, you will be taking an unplanned journey without organisation or discipline.
Similarly, when you are in business you need to achieve leads and turn those leads into your buying customers. This can only be made possible when you follow a certain process and an effective strategy.
Each and every business requires a specific direction to get itself established. Without direction, your business will struggle to grow and suffer from a lack of activity.
SPRAY AND PRAY MARKETING
‘Spray and pray marketing’ can be defined as a marketing technique without direction. It is a situation where professionals continue attempt to attract clients without having the after image of their actions and promotions.
They are relatively unaware whether the money being put by them would be fruitful or not. Overall it is an unqualified and lazy attempt at marketing a business – of which the results are likely to be reflective of this.
Spray and pray is the best name chosen for the kind of marketing technique it is. It is a case of large scale, ‘spraying’ and hoping that within the randomness, some traction is received.
It can often be used in circumstances were, a young company are unaware of their ideal customer profile or a business in desperately in search of a ‘quick win’, opposed to the sustainable approach for new business.
Ultimately, due to its unpredictable nature, nobody can take the risk with a directionless strategy as it is a waste of resources and not a positive ROI.
5 REASONS TO AVOID SPRAY AND PRAY MARKETING
Reasons you should avoid spray and pray marketing:
- Presence on unnecessary and multiple platforms
- Not directed, not valuable
- Marketing channels are neither targeted nor focused
- Same emails, same letters and same brochures sent to everyone
- Everybody is sent to the same website
- Presence on Unnecessary Platforms
Whether it’s B2B or B2C, the prime concern for both of the businesses is to establish their presence among audiences which are done through promotion & ad.
On one hand, B2C has various channels to advertise themselves and their products. For instance, television ads, radio ads, billboards etc. But B2B organizations aren’t generally seen advertising on such platforms.
They usually advertise through emails, blog posts, online ads, and videos, etc. or we can say B2B’s only source of advertising is over the internet.
The main objective of your business should be to keep your brand at the top of people’s mind and to keep them engaged with the quality content you provide.
But when you start advertising it unnecessarily on each and every platform which is obviously not wanted, it seems cluttered and makes people lose their interest. Because excessive of everything is bad. This is the reason why they get spammed.
The best way to keep people interested in your content and to escape from getting being spammed is to advertise wherever required and to some specific channels only. Don’t create a mess.
- Not Directed, Not Valuable
Advertisements under spray and pray marketing aren’t directed at some distinct website or certain targeted people but are randomly advertised everywhere. They are not even found to be valuable since they promise to deliver high-quality contents at the time of advertising but when people reach to them they don’t find what they actually promised.
So people feel that they are being misled with such kind of advertisements. Hence, they don’t want to engage themselves with such advertisements and find those ads annoying and obtrusive.
According to the HubSpot Survey, 64% people found online ads are intrusive and annoying and as a result, they use the ad blocker to prevent them from appearing.
Apart from finding it intrusive and annoying, people are concerned about their security. They feel online ads are not secured. I won’t say don’t advertise, do advertise because branding is necessary but not anywhere and everywhere.
- Marketing Channels Aren’t Targeted or Focused
Where one side it is required for the marketing channels to be targeted and focused, spray and pray marketing doesn’t even bother about it.
As discussed earlier, they do everything randomly, they don’t focus on the target audience and hence they don’t even get right people. Also, this may be a reason because they don’t find right channels for themselves.
Whereas, B2B always needs to play safe. They are supposed to focus and target the right audience and to get to the right audience a right channel and a right platform is required.
Earlier, marketers had no idea about what ads led to conversions or which one would bring revenue but, today, we have various online advertising platforms that offer various advanced tracking features with the ability to track and monitor leads as they flow through the sales funnel.
Hence, it’s advised to be targeted & focused if you want your efforts to be fruitful.
- Same Material Sent to Everyone
Sending the same emails, letters and brochures to everyone neither get them solutions concerned with their queries nor give them details about the specific products they bought from you.
When you offer a number of products, people will buy them according to their needs and will have different queries. But when you sent the same email to everybody, they don’t get satisfied with your answer and as a result, they get disappointed and lose interest in what you provide them.
What you can do to avoid this problem is to segment them. You obviously know who bought what from you.
Segment each and every customer on the basis of their interests and products they purchased from you and create your own questions and answers of what people will face when they buy such thing from you. It would be, then, easy for you to gain and retain the interest of customers who are dissatisfied with your answers.
Hence, it would be better if you make some real changes in your automation tools.
- Everybody Is Sent To the Same Website
Visitors hardly spend couples of second on a website. If they don’t find what they are looking for, they just hit the back button.
But when you’re sending everyone to the same website, you are actually giving that client the right information to make their buying decision.
If you ever check you web stats and look at your bounce rates and find it to be 70-80%, believe me it’s not a good sign. You really need to work way hard to grab the interest of your visitors so that they come again and again to view more articles on your web page.
This problem can be overcome by sending different clients on different page. Buyers should be sent to some other page, trainers to other and so on.
TAKEAWAYS
One can conclude from above discussion that spray and pray marketing isn’t required especially when it comes to B2B. The reasons have already been mentioned above. So, try to put your efforts into something that is more targeted, that has some direction that resonates with your client’s requirements and more.
Hence, B2B marketers should completely put a full stop to spray and pray marketing since they are not supposed to kick the ball anywhere they want and if you want to kick, kick it at the right place.
Anthony Musker:
I am a digital marketer and content writer at Whoisvisiting.com. I implement the marketing activities including email, social and SEO – I have various experience within sales and marketing teams, working for start-up companies and in the PR industry.